DISQUS

If you're after vintage patterns, the obvious place is ebay (seeing as it is rare to find much that old in charity shops these days) - my other half has boxes of them, and a group of her similarly (vintage) inspired friends have been running a sewing circle for the last couple of years - although they had the advantage that one of them was already experienced.

A good/fun starting book is 'Yeah, I Made It Myself' mostly as the author used to be in C86/DIY band Talulah Gosh, so coming very much from a non-fashion angle. Then again, that tends to mean simple A-line shapes (as one of M's friends remarks, she keeps trying to make the perfect dress - for a 6 year old at a party). A search on Amazon for this turns up similar titles too.

The other option is to go to dress makers, shirt makers and tailors - if you're lucky and you have ones that still cater to an 'everyday' rather than special occasions market (and I am sure Birmingham does), it's more expensive that the Primark-to-Next end of the high street, but usually cheaper than (say) Karen Millen, and at least you get something unique AND you're supporting independent business.

(The last shirt I had done, 3 people tried to buy it off the shirt-maker, as the fabric was from Liberty. It ended up costing nearly as much as a Liberty shirt, but wasn't baggy/over-sized like many Men's clothes today).

But it has to be said that it's more intimidating than clothes shopping, in that you need to have a good idea of what you want, and to know the terms or at least a photograph or drawing. Best of all is having something existing you just want copying.

Oh, and if you're getting serious, a variform dummy that you can adjust to your body shape is a good idea, as it beats trying to adjust what you're wearing.

Package tours seem to be remarkably expensive, but with a bit of searching on the internet, getting flights and a hotel in Tromsø is not too bad, and you have a 50% chance on any night from about mid-October.

We got lucky on the first night with a small display, but nothing on the other 2 nights, even though the skies were clear. You get the fun of walking round in lots of snow anyway . . .

(What's amazing is that the internal flight from Oslo to Tromso takes 2 hours and is near enough straight North).

I saw Susanna (with her Magical Orchestra aka a bunch of keyboards) play at 'The Shed' in North Yorkshire - it's an arts venue in a village hall right out in the middle of the country. Anyway, it was a superb gig, and she did a wonderful version of the even popular Hallelujah . . . but I didn't realise she'd released another album last year, so this is now on the list!

From what I understand, the code is restricted within a sandbox, so I'm guessing it's more about re-using existing C libraries in your web apps, than connecting to the wider operating system.

Although I do wonder about the Quake thing, as that suggests some kind of access to, or built in, drawing APIs (we know they have a graphics lib).

I'd like to know some more details about the project - are they taking an LLVM approach like Alchemy, or are they actually trying to do ActiveX done right?

From what I understand, the code is restricted within a sandbox, so I'm guessing it's more about re-using existing C libraries in your web apps, than connecting to the wider operating system.

Although I do wonder about the Quake thing, as that suggests some kind of access to, or built in, drawing APIs (we know they have a graphics lib).

I'd like to know some more details about the project - are they taking an LLVM approach like Alchemy, or are they actually trying to do ActiveX done right?

To clarify - I'm not saying KDE/Qt is a weak platform compared to native Mac or Windows development - just that using any x-platform toolkit is a weaker choice, while on KDE, Qt IS the native choice.

It response to David Geller - the moment I thought Nokia had 'got' the iPhone was the moment they acquired Trolltech. It showed that they understood the important thing was to own a software development platform.

Now Qt may have some weaknesses compared to native application development on the Mac or Windows (it is the native platform for KDE Linux), but from what I've read up, it looks like a good clean modern platform.

I also suspect that many C++ developers will find Qt a faster transition than Cocoa/Obj-C, because it allows them to maintain their 'way of thought' (regardless of whether it may be more effective to use a more dynamic language).

One last thought - this can't just be a phone. It has to be a platform for all their devices. Otherwise it's just the N-Gage, or the N800 all over again - it doesn't matter if you have dominant market force if most of the sales are (like my Nokia phone) a simple candy-bar phone. It's the market size of the platform, not the company, which matters to developers - and that is how Apple are punching way above their weight here.

The world would have survived fine without Microsoft - before Windows dominated there were plenty of competing systems - Atari ST & Commodore Amiga spring to mind as a systems that were a lot cheaper than Apple, and far in advance of Windows. Before MS-DOS you had the CPM system as a standard, non-proprietary, operating system for business software.

Equally, money spent on R&D doesn't equal innovation. By MS own admission a lot of the money in Windows development is spent on ensuring backward compatibility, because that's hugely important to it's customers (in contrast, the only way you'lll run Apple software older than about 5-6 years is under emulation).
The measured difference between the most and least productive programming languages is also about sixfold.

The question is whether MS needs to be cool. IBM are not cool and have never been cool, but know how to work with businesses to make money, whereas cool is, by definition, transient - you're only ever cool until someone else is.

What it does need to do is stop worrying about image and spin and start worrying about products.

PS - as for the Xerox PARC comments someone mentioned - do some research and you'll find Xerox got shares in Apple, so they did benefit from their lab work. In turn, it wasn't the first mouse driven system, only the first windowing system.

I do love Sharron Kraus - I discovered her via the 'Leaves from off the Tree' album she recorded with Meg Baird and Helena Espvall, which just sounded utterly timeless.

Similar background here - I was always intrigued by the QL (first 68000 based machine) though. And it's funny to see the Transputer architecture coming back in (Cell/Core). They were right - that we couldn't just keep increasing clock-speeds. Just 15 years too early.

You should take a look at the GCSE IT course books - a whole page / exercise for 'Closing Internet Explorer'. The curse of 'relevance'.

Phil - I don't agree that the relational database paradigm starts to fail 'when you get big'. As someone who started out using heirarchcical databases - which is what XML essentially takes us back to - I know that they too have problems when the complexity of your table structure expands - that's 'getting big' in a different sense. You get particular problems when you need to join two sub-elements together.

Of course, it depends on your problem space - i.e. are you dealing with complex structured data? In Google's case you're looking at huge amounts of unstructured data. Ditto something like Twitter.

And yes, not using 3rd (or even 6th) normal form when designing schemas is blasphemy! More seriously - the trade-off needs to be fully understood when you're making that decision, and I'm not convinced that most front-end developers fully understand the implications. De-normalising a schema for performance a LOT easier than normalising a badly designed schema.

>Personally, I welcome these constraints. I already treat MySQL as a hash and put all the logic in >my application

As a counter-example - I work on a system where we have had the same database since the 80s, but we're now on the 4th different programming language on the frontend. My expectation is now that any front-end system has a 5-7 year lifespan.

After correcting garbage inserted via third-party apps (which hadn't implented our business logic) I've come to the view that there's nothing wrong with having validation in every tier - most of ours is in the middle tier, but some validation has always been in the client tier only.

I also freak when I see the time people spend in Java implementing something on the client side to filter results returned from the database because they didn't know it could have been done by adding a single line to their SQL query. ("Me, learn SQL? But that's at a layer beneath where I work").

But I would agree with you that simplicity is good. A lot of the 'problem' may come down to the fact that so many web frameworks do use a relational d/b for object storage by default, when something simpler could do the job of mere object persistence, if that's all you need.

(It's the old arguement about the needs of enterprise apps cluttering things up for simpler jobs)

Leo - let's step back a second. Do we know that Apple deliberately bricked the phones? Or was it the hack that bricked them?

I can't see a good financial motivation for doing so, given that each working phone represents 2 years of revenue. The best case would have been restoring the phone to factory state - and it would have avoided easy to predict negative PR. The only upside I can see is that it will make people suspicious of any future unlocking.

For what it's worth - the 2 year contract and inability to change networks is precisely why the iPhone isn't for me, much as I'd love the hardware.

As for the metaphor - the problem is that you didn't buy a Cow, you bought a contract to produce milk. Even if you had to buy your own Cow first to get the contract. And the terms of the contract were that you only use your Cow to do what Apple say you're allowed to do.

The fact that the iPhone and iPod touch CAN do so much more is moot.

Eventually I suspect Apple will need to compete with Smartphones, but at the moment that market is miniscule compared to competing with the RAZR or Chocolate - which is where this device is really aimed.

Interesting - Apple's strategy works well for the consumer market, but possibly hurts them in business markets (apart from specific verticals like media production).

I'm not sure the MS development community would buy the same NDA restrictions as Apple's ADC members either. They work in a different marketplace - for instance Apple third party developers will be delivering Leopard only apps the day it ships, whereas it's pretty hard to find Vista enhanced apps, let alone Vista only ones. With pretty good reason - it took years for most PCs to switch to XP, whereas Apple OS updates spread almost as fast as the Flash player. Partly, of course, because of the third-party software market. Equally partly because Apple don't release updates of frameworks like Direct-X or .NET outside of OS releases.

Still, only announcing what you know you're going to deliver would be a starting point! That's the mess Apple got themselves into before the reverse merger with NeXT, and probably a good reason why Jobs seized control in the way he did - their reputation was in tatters at that point.

Actually it's interesting that Apple have a reputation for secrecy given that the 'Just one more thing' announcements are far fewer than the pre-announcements - but that in itself is good PR work. The iPhone, for instance, was pretty much revealed in patents in 2006.

>Anyone know if it affects both Intel and PPC?
Well if it's Java then yes . . . (watch Jobs get rid of Java from OS X as well as the iPhone - 'I told you it was a goddamn ball and chain).

I like the fact Firefox is affected too, because it makes a lot of people look dumb for thinking that makes them better/safer and mouthing off before knowing the facts.

Also - changing the rules of the contest is completely acceptable as it's been clear - you could see it as a sequence of challenges. Personally I think the fact the second challenge has been achieved gives more credibility to OS X surviving the 'drive-by' phase - it shows it's not just that no one can be bothered, but that it survived.

The problem will come when it hits the mainstream media, or at least cnet, where the story will become confused, or simplified.

Robert C - we just don't know Apple's strategy or what efforts they put in, internally, into security, do we. The fact that MS employ a full time security PR team, and have realised it pays to engage with the security community, tells us nothing about Apple. Just as we don't know how effective any Mac AV software is. Here's our opportunity to find out.

Distribution of vuln : I'd guess mySpace or any other easily hacked site that allows embedded code / mashups, and has an audience likely to have a significant number of Mac users. Or at the very least that's the kind of place you can get somewhere to link somewhere dumb by spamming comments.
Or put up a site of 'Leapoard preview screenshots'.

>Ahhh, so there is going to be a use for multi-core processors after all
No, we need them to run the multiple embedded Flash scripts in your typical mySpace page!

KeyCue from Ergonis - gives a visual overlay of the current available keyboard shortcuts, which is great for learning. I also use PopChar from the same developers as I don't use alternate characters often enough to remember the short-cuts.

Overflow or Todos - once your dock is full, you need some way to manage your apps. I'm sure Quicksilver is a better solution, but I'm more 'mouse' than keyboard.

I started out using Todos - ttp://www.dbachrach.com/opensoft/index.php?page=Todos

It was also the first app that caused me to learn Applescript, as I wanted to hook it up so I could trigger it from the Mighty Mouse. Took me about 15 minutes to learn how to do it and have it done (simulated key-press, compile script, link to mouse button).

http://www.dbachrach.com/opensoft/index.php?pag...

These days I'm using Overflow more :
http://www.stuntsoftware.com/Overflow/
It has the advantage of being able to have multiple categories for grouping apps (what I really want is a Dock that does the same - where I could rapidly change it between working contexts - pretty much the opposite of Virtue / Spaces which allow me to have multiple desktops but just one dock).

Todos is still a fun way of seeing what you have got installed though.

Automator and Folder Actions are also worth getting to grips with. As well as learning how to replicate any keyboard event with the mouse, I have a 'Send to Phone' folder linked to a Bluetooth-based Automator action.

Point is that Apple - or Sony or MS - still have time to own the HD space. It's early days yet. I presume there were/are a lot of engineering compromises on the ATV to hit the price spot they were targeting, and I doubt it could consistently render all H264 HD content without stuttering or over-heating, given that it causes the fans to start going at full speed on a Mac Mini.

More to the point, I doubt anyone can currently hit that price point without it also being subsidised by a content sales model like the PS3 or XBox.

Apple's focus is always on doing 'less' well - 'it just works' and all that.

As for 'fuzziness' . . . I've always found Apple's DVD software player to be fuzzy compared to Quicktime. Perhaps there's some issue with their scaling routines that causes output to become blurry at certain resolutions?

The other question is whether Apple will 'upgrade' the ATV to support some of the services people are hacking in - i.e. Joost. I can understand why they won't do Div-X (name the amount of legitimate content in Div-X format) but I can see the value in supporting other on-line video models. (Lest we forget, Jobs is also CEO at Disney, so he's also - in another role - pushing the ABC player model).